[dang]

The problem is that most of the upvotes and many of the comments on this post were completely inorganic. They were done by people trying to help promote your thread.

I'm not talking about the replies you posted; I'm talking about top-level comments that appeared to be organic and actually weren't.

If you didn't ask friends/fans/users to upvote or comment, or pass a link around (which is usually interpreted as such a request), then someone else did. No doubt they were trying to "help" you. Whoever it was, they need to understand that on HN, it doesn't help, it hurts. It's against HN's rules and we ban accounts and sites that do it. It's also something that the community here is extremely vigilant about and considers spamming.

If you don't want to get banned, and/or flagged and flamed by HN users, you should make sure this doesn't happen again.